Alleghany County, North Carolina / Whitehead / Air Bellows / Blue Ridge Mountains / mountain music / and so on. An open journal of one person in one place in one time.

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Monday, December 28, 2009

THE WIND OF CHANCE

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The wind chimes are making music this evening. Gusts of wind pass by and make music with more or less random notes always pleasing to the ear. Brings American composer John Cage to mind, who played with principles of chance in his music, some of it lovely as wind chimes. A sun shining day with snow still on the ground, patches of ground showing through. The snow crust is ice after a day of rain and a night of freezing, a day just above freezing, a night below freezing, meaning it's with us for awhile. The 10-day forecast doesn't indicate any melting weather coming up. The weather will go on next week close to like it's been the last few weeks. Cold during the day, colder at night.

This winter seems to belie the global warming talk over the last several years. And dear old Al Gore stuck his neck out as the prophet of global warming after the international embarassment of the coup that put him out of the presidency he was elected to. Since the film, which I found over-praised and nothing new, the patterns of hurricanes he articulated have changed altogether. It's not to say he didn't have his finger on the people who know what is happening, only that this must be a freak winter as the pattern for the last several winters has been milder every year. The most interesting thing I found in the Gore-Bush election, is both their names are nouns and verbs. Polar bears are drowning at sea and eating each other. That says a whole lot.

I can't help but think there is something about the weather that is conscious and knows about our satellites and one thing and another we study the weather by. It seems like when a conclusion gets drawn about the weather, something else happens. The weather people have it now to

where they can put down a 10-day forecast to the degree in temperature, and it be so close to accurate it can be called accurate with a straight face.

It seems like there are times when forecasts don't work and forecasters have to fess up, the weather is doing its unpredictable thing today. Somebody told me a few days ago a bomb was set off on the moon a few days before to get a dust cloud up so it could be studied grain of sand by grain of sand.

That's some advanced science, the kind of minds involved that get Nobel Prizes. MIT, Berkeley, Harvard, Princeton, Yale, all these schools and many more graduate an awful lot of brilliant minds with excellent educations every year. Where are they? They are not out here in the world. They are clustered in universities, cloistered away as effete intellectuals the rest of society doesn't even want to know about. Too boring for television. It's something you have to pay attention to. Too bad for It. Turn on the dog show.

The part I have a hard time getting is people like Cheney, Rummy and Condi had good educations, did well in school. Brilliant minds. They attempted to replace the Constitution with Ayn Rand's fiction, making me wonder what making good grades means. Made me wonder, too, what an intelligent black woman was doing in that company. It's hard to know what real intelligence is. I sometimes think what a cartoon moment it would be with Condi in an elevator. The door opens and there's Angela Davis. I believe they'd recognize each other and be friendly, appreciating each other's minds first so the politics would be secondary, like a job. Meaning, that's not how it would be at all.

I learned in the time when Jr's mind was going and gone that anything I ever might expect is never the case. If it happens some time or other, that's merely law of averages or something like that. Chance. Every time I was ready to open the door after being at the grocery store or feeding the cats, I reminded myself to clear my mind of any expectations. Whatever I expect will not be what I find. Ever. That clued me to look for that out and around in everyday life to start paying attention to my expectations. What I found was they're never accurate, and when they're not I'm disappointed. I want to be disappointed less, so I expect less. It seems like something as audacious as jumping off a cliff with a hang glider to let go of expectations. But now it seems ridiculous to go about with expectations. Jr was good schooling for me in many ways, letting go of expectations the best learning I can think of. There was more than that, but this is good enough for now.

Jr stays with me a good bit now. After the call of the hoot owl the night of the day he left, it has seemed like memory of Jr faded and was fading away. But now, when I drive the car, it feels like he's in the passenger seat watching the countryside go by. I feel his presence in the car like I could talk to him. Jr taught me to take an interest in the weather. Not by intent, but he paid such close attention to it, I had to notice too. Jr understood flow. He knew the flow of the weather, the flow of water, the flow of air. He understood it, not in words but by feel. When it was 80 degrees in the house and 23 outside, Jr was cold. He saw enough change over the last 30 years to see the weather is different from what it used to be. Nothing I can do about it but sing, Que sera sera.

Once life is finished it acquires a sense,up to that point it has not got a sense,its sense is suspended and therefore ambiguous.

---PIER PAOLO PASOLINI

Illusions mistaken for truth are the pavement under our feet. They are what we call civilization.

---BARBARA KINGSOLVER

Brace yourself. The American Empire is over and the descent is going to be horrifying.

---Chris Hedges

Start learning to love by loving the people you cannot like. The more you remember others with kindness and generosity, the more you forget your self and when you forget yourself completely, you find God.

---Meher Baba

GO GREEN WITH BLUEGRASS.IT'S NATURAL.

---TIM WHITE, banjo the VWBoys

DEATH CANNOT HARM MEMORE THAN YOU HAVE HARMED ME,MY BELOVED LIFE.

---Louise Gluck, from her poem OCTOBER

THROW ENOUGH STONESAND YOU BUILD A WALL.

---Carole Roberts

STAY AWAY FROM IMPORTANT PEOPLE.

---Wiley Maxwell Jr

A THROW OF THE DICE WILL NEVER ABOLISH CHANCE.

---Man Ray

GOD DOES NOT PLAY DICE WITH THE UNIVERSE.

---Albert Einstein

American old-time music quarterly

The beliefs and opinions of a person often constitute a very superficial layer of the human psyche. They do not have any integral relationship with the deeper psychic forces. They remain in one region of the mind without bringing about any radical changes in the core of personality, which determines the attitude to life.

---Meher Baba

Justice is what love looks like in public.

--- Cornell West

Everyone thinks of changing the world, but no one thinks of changing himself.

---Leo Tolstoy

The mountains don't lie to you; they stand for the things that don't change, that stay true to themselves. They've been around a hundred million years and they'll be around a good while more, I reckon. They keep you humble. They put you in your place.

An excellent catalog of music from the Central Blue Ridge

There are more love songs than anything else.If songs could make you do somethingwe'd all love one another.

---Frank Zappa

on playing a banjo:

WHEN YOU SCREW UPTRY TO COVER IT UPLIKE A CAT.

---Wiley Maxwell, Jr.

ACTION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN PRAYER.

---Dalai Lama

THE WHOLE SECRET LIES IN CONFUSING THE ENEMY SO HE CANNOT FATHOM OUR REAL INTENT.

Sun TzuThe Art of War

WE'LL KNOW OUR DISINFORMATIONPROGRAM IS COMPLETE WHENEVERYTHING THE AMERICAN PEOPLEBELIEVE IS FALSE.

---Wm Casey CIA Director 1981

In this unbroken intense booming symphony, suddenly there is the tinkling of a bell so faint that I almost think I am hearing things. It is like the trembling cry of a cicada on a late autumn night. It is so ephemeral, so delicate, so pitiful, yet it is so distinct and clear above the chaotic booming of the drum that it is unmistakable.